Alone and Need Ideas? Try This Tool

There is something to be said for the dynamic that occurs when people can engage and bounce ideas off of each other.

Sometimes though, we need to come up with ideas on our own. One great tool for this is the Reverse Dictionary.

The human mind is great at making connections between disparate concepts, at building off of metaphor. A Reverse Dictionary provides idea fuel for the brain.

The best way to learn about this is to try it yourself. To get the ball rolling though, I’m going to walk through an example.

Say I’m looking for a way to decrease problems in nursing homes. I entered in three words on the main page: ‘loneliness, mistakes, illness’. Three terms that define what many people in nursing homes go through.

The results are here. When I look at these 100 terms I see some that are curious, others that I have no idea what they are, some that seem totally unrelated. Those are the terms that I follow up with and investigate further. I’ll list some of those here:

1. Iatrogenesis – A fancy way of saying adverse effects to treatments. Things like drug interactions, errors, negligence all fall under this term. I thought it was fascinating that this is the first term in the list dealing with problems in nursing homes.

47. Toc H – I had no idea what this was so I looked it up here. It’s an international charity movement started during World War I. The fundamental beliefs of this organization are: Fellowship (To Love Widely); Service (To Build Bravely); Fairmindedness (To Think Fairly); and the Kingdom of God (To Witness Humbly). There’s something there to build upon.

95. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz – A string of letters, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s confusing but it contains all the letters of the alphabet; it would mean something if it was reorganized and cleaned up. It makes me think about gleaning useful information from elderly communication, of proper interpretation of symptoms, language and circumstances.

99. Indian Sex Stone – “The American field archeologist’s term for a natural rock that is mistaken for an artifact, usually a preform or bola stone, in the field. Most such mistakes are made by inexperienced field crew members, who learn quickly not to make such errors.” Wow… a lot to ponder here and it ties in with #5.

100. Sam the Robot – “The only robot on Sesame Street. He always tries to do things right, and even insists that he is perfect, but he always does things wrong. Typical mistakes of his would be drawing a circle instead of a square or pouring coffee on the ground.” Another Wow! Are there Sam the Robots among the caretakers? How do we deal with this type of psychological type?

Now that I have these concepts, I can delve into them further, learn more about them and let this information percolate in my conscious and subconscious. I can use these as metaphors for coming up with even more ideas for ways of addressing problems in nursing homes.